Change History (4)

Confirmed. This happens with valid markup too: <a name="google" href="http://google.com">google</a> is changed to <a name="google" href="http://google.com"></a>google.
The href attribute doesn’t make a difference. Without it the same happens.

This has come up before. The visual editor separates anchors and links as the name attribute was formally deprecated in XHTML 1.0. In HTML 5.0 this was "downgraded" to a recommendation to always use ID instead of name.

Currently you can use an anchor followed by a link:

<a name="123"></a><a href="go-there">...</a>

which will work in exactly the same way.

If you really need to still use <a name="..."> and have it act as a link too, perhaps open a ticket on TinyMCE's ​bug-tracker.